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Ben Werdmuller:
@barnabywalters When I took a (6hr) flight to NY recently, I had 11 hours left when we landed. Insane.

@benwerd I for one welcome our new low-power-consumption overlords, whilst mourning just how much catching up battery technology has to do, and musing how easy it appears to be to manipulate users’ emotions towards a product through small UI lies.

Facebook chat is a mixture of exceedingly useful (if slightly creepy) features such as granular read notifications, but lacks the ability to mention a particular person in a group chat. In some ways, IRC is still way ahead in terms of these microinteractions and small feedback loops.

On the first day of Christmas Steve Knightley gave to me the Keys of Canterbury
On the second day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me two Tracks of Words…
On the third day of Christmas Steve Knightley gave to me three Cutthroats, Crooks and Conmen…
On the fourth day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me four Beaten Bushes…
On the fifth day of Christmas Steve Knightley gave to me five Bristol Slavers…
On the sixth day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me Six O’Clock Waltzes…
On the seventh day of Christmas Steve Knightley gave to me seven Galway Farmers…
On the eigthth day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me eight Blind Fiddlers…
On the ninth day of Christmas Steve Knightely gave to me nine Silver Daggers…
On the tenth day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me ten Preachers on islands…
On the eleventh day of Christmas Steve Knightly gave to me eleven Crazy Boys…
On the twelfth day of Christmas Show of Hands gave to me twelve Twats Twittering…

In the best of Walters #family traditions, went for a snailshell collecting walk and now can’t stop eating dried mango whilst forumlating plans for THE ULTIMATE LAPTOP CASE to be made before I fly back to Iceland

This treble recorder is an example of understandable design. For various reasons it’s separated into three parts and has to be assembled before usage, but a consistent decrease in diameter and significantly differently sized joints for both ends leave no ambiguity about how it should be assembled.

On their own the parts are unbalanced with exposed unpolished joints. Assembling the instrument creates a balanced, visually consistent object, and a sturdy interference fit gives the user extra confidence that the device is ready for use.

This Icelandic bus timetable is an example of confusing design, due to the inconsistent usage of colour and direction. The grids of times must be read top to bottom then left to right, contrary to most western languages. The yellow blocks (expressing at what intervals between the given times each bus leaves) are not strongly associated with the durations above them, and from a distance, the pairs look much like times themselves.

Last work morning of the year at Vísar today — really enjoyed the 9 months I’ve spent with the great people here so far. Looking forward to having a break before running a whole bunch of surveys in the new year!

Loving that #design101 exercises require going out and taking photos of things instead of just sitting in front of the screen checking boxes. Going to post any interesting ones here and POSSE the answers back to Udacity! #indieweb

@jkphl nice work! Looks like you’ve done a really good job of solidifying a bunch of common content-consumption patterns (e.g. firstof). RE externalAuthor, have you seen the indiewebcamp.com/authorship algorithm?